The Business of Blogging

Is blogging a hobby or a business?  Think Steve Wozniak’s garage.  A tinkerer’s pastime became a trillion dollar global business that has transformed the planet’s landscape in ways we do not yet fully comprehend, all in two short decades.

The acquisition of information used to follow predictable patterns.  The era of the personal computer changed all this.  It transferred the means of production from the realm of specialists to the realm of consumers.  Globalization and outsourcing got a quantum boost when the Internet made talking with India as easy as talking with Indiana.

Just think about how fast the trickle of early adoption became a streaming torrent of exponential growth.  The term weblog was coined and first used less than a decade ago, yet now there are more blog sites than there ever were newspapers.  The entrenched media were slow to realize what was occurring until they were hit upside the head with citizen participatory journalism had snuck up on them.  The Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Dan Rather/CBS News investigation of President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and even more recently the emotionally charged Meet The Press interview of Jefferson Parish, New Orleans, LA Aaron Broussard’s tearful proclamation post Hurricane Katrina were all were first examined and/or analyzed by bloggers, and were later adopted as full-blown stories by the mainstream media only when they realized that their previously-impermeable hierarchies of command and control have been, well – dis-intermediated.

Blogging is to words as Napster was to music, a transforming technology whose influence and implications will only grow more wide-ranging with time.

Imagine that you are a large corporation engaged in the manufacture and sales of widgets.  Your organizational chart is fairly predictable.  The vast majority of workers make the widgets or supervise those that work on the widget assembly line.  A smaller group of employees work in the field, selling the widgets, and an even smaller group of executives devise the strategies and monitor all the systems that must operate to ensure the efficient production and distribution of the product in a competitive marketplace.  This basic structure is the same whether you manufacture a material product or process something more ephemeral, like information.   In traditional business structures, the information flows primarily in one direction, from the powerful spots on the top of the hierarchy downward.  Enlightened managers may have placed an anonymous suggestion box on the workplace floor, but even that was a recognition that fine-tuning any production process was best accomplished by those that actually participated in it.  By anonymizing the process, the manager was able to cherry-pick the best ideas without disrupting the hierarchy.  The same thing applied to company newsletters and magazines.  They emanated from on high and served such useful purposes as informing the workforce of changes or adaptations, or elevating morale.

Along comes the blog.  Anyone can create one, practically for free.  The early adopters were frequently voices in the wilderness, people with a point of view but no means to broadcast it.  Just as Hollywood first saw television as a threat, and missed its greater significance as an allied technology that could enhance the marketing and distribution of feature films, so too did businesses perceive blogs as annoying usurpations of their “system”.  Employees were fired for serious offenses such as disclosing company secrets or undercutting company campaigns, but just as often got the axe for posting photos of themselves in company uniforms, or for gently criticizing a misguided management policy.

 

As blogs have become more commonplace, resistance to them gradually softened.  To some, they’ve become be a useful tool, not only an expression of muted hostility.  Giant firms like General Motors, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have all embraced the blog, and required that senior management operate them for such critical functions as dispute resolution, product liability information, even labor/management negotiations.  Blogs can facilitate internal communications, or act as an avenue for customer feedback.   Their threaded, chronological nature creates a legal record and provides a well of history into which any interested reader can delve.

Traditional businesses are hierarchical and don’t usually encourage mid-level initiative.  The web is a lateral series of volitional associations, one almost impossible to monitor or control.  The architecture of the blog has enabled a dialogue, the most appropriate dialogue, to take place, outside the reins of hierarchy and in the spirit of egalitarian information transfer.  The company that refuses to recognize the utility of this because it violated protocol faces the fate of the horse-and-buggy and the typewriter.

Blogging is a digital medium, one more way to tell stories and assess their relevance.  It’s another channel, and for some, a disruptive one.  Blogs allow conversations where none could occur before.  They are currently, and will greatly change the way that business is conducted at virtually every level.